Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Big Ideas

Web 1.0 and 2.0 this week

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So I have been off and about the world for a few weeks. I am finally back in the bay area and trying to recover from the nasty cold that I caught while at Accelerating Change. I had a great week at Web of Change except I was fighting the cold. I had more great meetings about the forthcoming global launch of i-names services this week in Palo Alto.
Next week will be a big week. I am going to be at Web 2.0 and just found out about the ‘alternative summit’ Web 1.0 happening simultaneously.

On Wednesday at the House of Shields and sponsored by 43 Folders and the year 1998, with generous contributions from Adaptive Path, Mule Design, WordPress, Blogger, and Flickr.
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
There will be beer.
Let’s make this summit more successful than the last one, please.

This is an interesting trend the creation of grass roots summits occurring as a counter point (FOO and BAR Camp) and open source alternative to giant corporate walled gardens talking about the future.

HIghlights from Accelerating Change:7 (Gamers will Save the Planet)

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This was a great talk by Cory from Second Life.
Games will Save the Planet!!! How? Playing games improves the capacity to critically filter the increasing volumes of information we are exposed to. Games give you a place to practice performance before competence. As you learn new skills you can also maintain an appropriate level of challenge. Games are full of disinformation and information asymmetry and coping with these challenges is a skill that they develop. Laziness is not tolerated in game play because they are hard. Games get harder and harder.
Education researchers are studying how game players are organizing and educating themselves in MMOG (massive multi online games) guilds. They are hoping that this research can be applied to traditional education. Games develop critical thinking goal oriented thinking. Those researching this include – Anne Gever, Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas. and UW – Madison Paul Gee, Kurt Squire.

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Highlights from Accelerating Change:6 (Brains, Spirit, Sex, Knowledge)

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From Dr. Amen: Brain protection is essential. The Brain is very soft like tofu and the skull is really hard. Brain injuries matter and we need to take care of young brains (like not let kids play football).
The conference took a spiritual theme at the end with the presentation by the chair of the leading private university in Taiwan with a major focus on Future Studies. Their conference coming up is Global Soul, Global Mind, Global Action.
Spiritual Technology is essential to support us slowing down enough to absorb and process the accelerating change of technical technology. Janardhan Chodagam presented about the Brahmin Kumari World Spiritual Organization and highlighted how meditation can transform deep rooted personality we don’t like.
Ray thinks we are going to have sex in new ways with nanotechnology and sensations evoked with direct nerve inputs over riding our regular sensory inputs. I really can’t imagine real sexual activity between real people being replaced by nanobots.
Ray highlighted some key elements of what makes human is how knowledge it transfered from generation to generation. It is this transfer of knowledge that is expanding exponentially and why computers and other tools are needed to cope.

Accelerating Change Highlights: 2 (Esther)

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Esther Dyson did a great thing opening her talk “I am going to lead this time like the internet – If you don’t like it go somewhere else. Do your own thing. This is what the net allows you to do.”

Governance on the Net – The best way to regulate systems is for the people loosing control someone else is loosing it. (This is the current theme of the Release 1.0) Accountable peer-to-peer as opposed to some authority that can be corrupted.
The rulesets you create matter a huge amount. You can’t just have an idea precision matters. You can’t just allow users to design the rules you may end up with the wrong set of rules. There is an evolution of competing models.
An organization that Esther is working on advising is safecount.org that is addressing cookie issues – if the decide they all should be disclosed she will continue to work with them.
Concentrated power gets abused. Power is so corrupting. Give people power to do things not power over people. Give more power to individuals and not the power of institutions.
The articulation of accountability and identity and identification.
Reliable accountability – the fact that what you did as X you are accountable today for what you did yesterday as X.
Peer to peer accountability. The less power anyone has the less it matters when they make a mistake. The mistakes that one makes matters less.

An illustrative example that was given about how market based mechanisms don’t necessarily work. This day care was having a problem with kids being picked up late. It wasn’t working for anyone -the kids would get stressed out, the daycare staff would have to stay late etc. So they decided to deal with in a market based way – $10 for every 5min you were late. This totally backfired because then it was no longer immoral to be late it was just expensive.

Live from Accelerating Change – DataTao, i-name Cell phone

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I am blogging from the soon to be open Accelerating Change Conference.
Andy gave me a ride down here and we talked about the announcement last week of DataTao.

DataTao is going to be an interoperable data hub for user controlled data. DataTao is primarily about programmatic access to an individual’s data and only has as much UI as is needed to richly support its base functionality.
So why do I call it an ‘interoperable’ data hub? That’s because DataTao is designed to act as a bridge between many of the current identity protocols. While DataTao will provide storage for people that don’t have their data stored and available from elsewhere, its main purpose is to consume and forward data from its authoritative source(s).
It is my opinion that DataTao is a necessary and required next step in the evolution of the DataWeb. While DataTao by itself is NOT a compelling application it is a needed piece of infrastructure. It will hopefully encourage and enable people to build internet 2.0 applications and maximize the leverage of those already built.
In order to drive adoption DataTao will provide some Apps that use the DataWeb for persistence in conjunction with the DataTao launch. These apps have not been finalized yet but will likely include Exchange and Mac Mail integration (Self updating address books) as well as a rich interface for person to person profile information sharing (i-share).

I got to meet Ajay of AmSoft for the first time and see the i-names being used on the a cell phone. This is push to communicate asserting preferred mode of communication.

Creating:
* Choice
* Privacy
* Control

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Emerging Understanding Swarms & other cool stuff at DorkBot SF

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On Wednesday Night I attended my first DorkBot – San Francisco. It was great to be in a room full of cool geeks.
Mark Pesce also spoke about evolutions happening in swarming.

Informational Swarms are the most efficient way to get the most information to the most people.
Knowledge Swarms [ Information + Context] Wikipedia is the example where everyone contributes a little bit. It is the ‘black hole of human knowledge’ and as we all contribute a little be we all are invested in it.
Understanding Swarms [Knowledge + Experience] What we can tell each other. Looking ahead being able to google your friends (ahh here is where persistent identity shows up!)

Spot Draves presented the lastest with Electric Sheep.
Jon Philips presented on how to build an online community. The key was having three things:

• 1 mailing list
• 1 wiki and
• 1 IRC channel

Eric Davis (a founder of Planetwork)
Spoke a bit about the network power to interlink machines and amplify human knowledge. He introduced Make Magazine and spoke to the form of magazine – the inter linking of word and image.
The folks from from Make Magazine were fantastic too. I love that magazine. I read it cover to cover when it comes out. Sitting there listening to me I reflected back…emembering my days in electronics class back in grade 9…and realizing that I have been inclined towards technology for a while. Perhaps I will get up the courage to build something from it soon.
Interestingly enough it is breaking all the rules for that business – with a sell through rate of 50-75% (normally 20% or less) and having back issues in the book section. They thought of it as a Mook (a book / magazine format invented in Japan). They also have only 12 pages of ads in 160 pages of space. Their circulation is 3.5 times larger then they expected it would be by this time at 35,000.
Then there was some ‘open-dorking’. I will go back but overall it was a bit frustrating because the evening felt over programmed. Once the room broke for drinks and sociallizing it would have been good energetically to let it continue. It is one of those process things that all communities encounter as they bring people together.

Digital Identity 'performance' by college kids

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Danah Boyde has a great post about Face Book – (an online social network only for those how are in college.) This paragraph really stood out for me because it highlights the social phenomena that those of us who typically work in digitial identity do not really ‘do’ – DIGITAL IDENTITY PERFORMANCE…

The Facebook is situated in a culture with a set of known practices and needs, helping students make sense of their universe and constantly changing social networks. Even the issues around performative profiles are dampened because college students are so engrossed in digital identity performance as a process of figuring out who they are. Between MySpace and The Facebook, teens are now growing up assuming social network tools and building the value into them but most adults have no interest; herein lies another age division that will certainly affect the future of technology use.

She also wonders about how the practices emerging in these educational facebooks can perhaps be picked up by corporate ones to make them more effective.

Unfortunately, in the corporate culture, tools are being built to only reflect a fraction of the networking practices – they are poorly aligned and dreadfully unflexible. It’s funny though – every big company tends to have a facebook of sorts – reporting charts, roles, seat assignments. What if those could grow to indicate projects and past cooperations between colleagues? What if non-salesman could articulate their relationships to people in other companies rather than having them uncomfortably sussed out via email? What if social networking tools were built into the already existing corporate framework? What would it mean to make the corporate facebooks more useful?

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IAA – TIA continues and PATRIOT expanded?

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Surveillance society quietly moves in

It’s a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: If you want to pass unpopular legislation that you know won’t stand up to scrutiny, just wait until the public isn’t looking. That’s precisely what the Bush administration did Dec. 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam Hussein.
Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the Intelligence Authorization Act – a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT Act that included items culled from the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” a draft proposal that had been shelved due to public outcry after being leaked.
Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual’s financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.
“The law also broadens the definition of ‘financial institution’ to include insurance companies, travel and real-estate agencies, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters’ “ warned Nikki Swartz in the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school transcripts or medical records.
“In one fell swoop, this act has decimated our rights to privacy, due process, and freedom of speech,” Anna Samson Miranda wrote in an article for LiP magazine titled “Grave New World” that documented the ways in which the government already employs high-tech, private industry, and everyday citizens as part of a vast web of surveillance.
Miranda warned, “If we are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to fight government and corporate surveillance and data collection, we will find ourselves unable to go anywhere – whether down the street for a cup of coffee or across the country for a protest – without being watched.”
Sources: “PATRIOT Act’s Reach Expanded Despite Part Being Struck Down,” Nikki Swartz, Information Management Journal, March/April 2004; “Grave New World,” Anna Samson Miranda, LiP, Winter 2004; “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7,” Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue June 7, 2004.

Censored – or bogus? (see below) was a caveat to caveat offered to the above story. I would like to know what others in our network/community know about this and see if the identity community can uncover what information is actually is being shared with government about our day to day personal transactions without our awareness.

Some stories get ignored by the mainstream media because they’re too controversial, or too much of a challenge to the rich and powerful, or just too hot to handle.
But some stories get dismissed because they’re just not credible – and unfortunately, one of the pieces Project Censored cites this year appears to fall into that category.
Almost everything on the Project Censored list is well sourced and, at the very least, plausible. But one of the stories listed under “Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In” is a piece titled “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7.” Written by Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, the piece was published on www.capitolhillblue.com, a Virginia Web site that’s been around since 1994.
The piece makes some pretty spectacular allegations. Hampton and Thompson claim not only that the Pentagon is defying Congress and covertly operating the notorious Total Information Awareness program (TIA) (which Congress explicitly killed), but also that the feds now monitor “virtually every financial transaction of every American,” in real time (that is, as it’s happening). They also maintain that the Pentagon uses the information to launch investigations of “persons of interest” and as a basis for adding names to the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” lists.
It’s pretty far-fetched to think that the Pentagon could run an operation so vast as to review almost every financial transaction in the country as it happens. But beyond that, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed two suits against the feds trying to pinpoint just how it collates TSA’s “no fly” lists and still hasn’t been able to figure it out.
The principal sources Hampton and Thompson base their story on seem to be an anonymous “security consultant who worked on the … project” and an “Allen Banks” – someone identified simply as a “security expert,” without any detail as to who he is or how he would be privy to such information.
Thompson, who is the site’s publisher, defended the accuracy of the story, saying that he’d spoken with “over 30 sources” – police, banks, credit card agencies – and that he reached his conclusions based on those sources as well as on the fact that there were “too many coincidences.” (None of that is explained in the story.)
“To some extent,” he added, “it was a conclusion by me, looking at the links.” Banks and other private industries had been instructed to e-mail data to the feds under TIA, and they continued sending data to the same places after TIA was killed, because they never received orders to stop, Thompson said. His caveat: “If I had to go into court and prove this, there’s no way I could prove it.”
We’re still dubious.
CTT

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Marc, EndUsers CARE!

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Marc Canter’s Law #1 has been published.

Canter’s Law #1:
– It is not a bad thing to make everyone happy. It sometimes requires compromises, but at the end of the day – by getting around the format Wars – we all benefit.
– So though we understand that having too many formats may confuse or muddy the waters – it won’t be muddy to the constituents of each format. Most developers will adhere to ONE philosophy and the others – will appreciate support for all.
– See Flickr
No human cares about what format is supported. Only us. Flickr proved that they could be completely format agnostic and provide a compelling experience to all.

Phil’s take on it...

– To make someone happy, you’ve got to support their format. To make everyone happy, you’ve got to support everyone’s formats.
– There are always going to be more formats than you want. Get over it.

All of this is very conciliatory to ‘technologist’s and their preferred file schema’s and file formats. I have no idea what the difference is between ATOM and RSS and RDF and I don’t really care they all work in my Aggreagator in basically the same way.
I am not sure if Marc is referring to ‘making everyone happy’ in the identity space but I believe that he is based on past comments and the assertion that GoingOn will use all the protocols. (DataTao also says they will support them all too)
In Identity land are not just dealing with file formats. We are dealing with user-centric identity. Let me spell it out for you E N D U S E R S and user experience.
You may support in your identity hub all the formats… XRI – i-names | SXIP – guppies | LID – Personal URL | OpenID URL | {how these two fathom that end users will start to login using a URL after inserting some ‘key’ in the back of their blog/site is beyond me}Passel e-mail of choice and on and on…….
Do you not think all this choice confuses END USERS to the point they will not adopt anything until there is one simple easy to understand way this user centric interop identity system works? Remember some of the folks using this system in the not to distant future will be functionally illiterate.
I basically agree with bob’s point.

But, if you focus too much on making some geek happy, the result will NOT be the “Right Thing” from the users’ point of view. Making one or two geeks happy is not the Right Thing if it means compromising on how well users’ needs are addressed. There are many more users than there are geeks. We need to be driven by a drive to service our users’ needs — not by the egos of geeks and coders.

Mary Hodder had this to say about the identity standards discernment and why it was SO key we figure it out inside our community before ‘going live’ and asking sites and users to adopt.

When I tell people about the identity systems being built, they look at me (sort of horrified) like they have absolutely no intention of ever using such a thing, and so i explain the benefits: single sign on, user control over how far the info goes, not having to give an email address in order to sign up for one or another services, which may reveal more info than you want to, and trust and reputation. At that point they are skeptical, but they usually say that if the single sign-on thing were fixed, and if they had total control over where their information went and how far, they ‘might’ use it.
So I mentioned this to the developer of the system I was testing, and he said that he was using his own protocol.. because ‘everyone else was doing it.’ When I asked why, he said ‘because I want to win’ which i really found very disturbing. He said the other protocol makers were all doing the same thing: ‘wanting to win’ and creating systems based upon their own protocols, so that users would not be able to take their identities from one place to the next.
To me this entirely defeats the purpose of the identity gang, and will be incredibly frustrating to users. More so that email, a personal digital identity representation will be a very personal and emotional thing for users, if it is usable all over and they see it as something that represents themselves because they use it to represent themselves. If not, users will say, what is the difference? Why change to an ID based system (insert ID protocol here: sxip, openID, iName, lid, etc) when it can only be used at one company, or with one set of services. It’s the same thing we have now as far as user’s experiences are concerned, with multiple sign ons.
I think competing based on different protocols is ridiculous and will not help anyone, least of all users. And with users frustrated, you will not get adoption that will really make ID service based businesses take off.
I think people will blog about these multiple proprietary protocols, saying that people should hold off or not play, until this gets worked out and the people developing systems create a single protocol that is open and freely movable.
I’m concerned about using our time constructively in the identity gang to create this single protocol so that we are then competing over services and interesting systems. Are we all on the same page here.. or is this developer right that we are all making different protocols (sort of in secret) to compete at that level?

New protocols … New Terms

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Eric Hall just pointed me to a great post by dizzyd of Passel about the challenges of doing a new from the ground up protocol/technology and how you communicate to the rest of the world what it does. Some learnings in there for all of us in this identity space. Hopefully during the Internet Identity Workshop we can have a big list of terms and their definitions posted on the walls for us to collectively discern with greater clarity their meaning so we can all communicate with one another better.

Mama we are coming to get you…NOT

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I have been watching the unfolding of the Katrina disaster. It makes my stomach churn to learn about how badly FEMA and other federal agencies bumbled this whole thing. We clearly have major human well being and community well being issues to deal with here. This interview of the head of Jefferson County is just heart wrenching (the blog title comes from this interview).
Here is a first hand account of a man’s son who was contracted by FEMA as a truck driver to get releif supplies to the affected areas.
Reading this I think that self organizing networks who had done some scenario planning exercises and have network tools for sharing real information from on the ground would have been hand to coordinate real relief. Perhaps a case study in the network failures and successes in the aftermath is a topic for MeshForum in May.
Live Blogging from the area.
Tales from a refugee camp…

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation
Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were
friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how
many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able
to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these
questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates
complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told
me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only
information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to
be here at night.”
There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up
any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on
buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special
needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for
possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

Reading this article I learned that the functional literacy rate New Orleans is about 40%. That means they can read a little but can’t fill out a job application, read a food label or read a simple story to a child. Makes me wonder how are we going to build an identity system that the functionally illiterate can use??
Van Jones a rising leader in the African American Community writes this great article about the responsibility of the Bush Administration for the disaster.
He also wrote this piece about “looting” and “finding” and race. It seems that how one is identified by race and class makes a difference to the media interpretation of actions in a catastrophic situation. Just to be clear I am not a big fan of identity politics in its raw form. Having said that I am also acutely aware that race and class are cultural forces in our society and that there is a role for considering how people with common a common identity – belonging to an ethnic group or making a certain income or having a particular sexual orientation or even gender affects ones experience in the world in systemic way.

Buzz-Phraser 2.0

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I just found a great post about Nathan Torkington creator of odio.us the Gateway to Web 2.0 Riches. Just go there and scroll up and down the Web 2.0 elevator pitches. The are really funny. I bet you he gets a lot of them these days as the producer of OSCON.
The original Buzz-Phraser 1.3 has three languages – TechnoLatin, CollaboLain and IdentoLatin. Hopefully it will be helpful for all those coming up with cool talks for us at the Internet Identity Summit.

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While I was out: 2 new blogs… Y!-Flkr eruptions

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A day after my computer died, Bob Blakley e-mailed me to let me know he had started blogging (and that it was in part my doing) for blogging his talk at Catalyst.
Here is his first post – Identity is a Story.
my comment: Indeed it is. I wrote a great resume story when I applied to work as a blogger at SpikeSource (I knew they never would hire me if I didn’t tell the story of why they should based on my past experience). Needless to say they hired me and then didn’t let me blog so that gig was over fairly fast.
He is very articulate about the range of issues that aries around identity:

I think identity behaves in consistent and predictable ways in the real world, BUT most contemporary discussions of identity are completely out of touch with what identity really is and how it really works. To understand how identity behaves, it’s necessary to distinguish the different uses people make of identity, and consider each of those uses individually.
I think a set of axioms of identity can be defined which describe what identity can and cannot do, and what it will and will not do in particular circumstances. We can enumerate these axioms by looking at centuries of thought about identity and examining that thought in the light of situations which occur in the real world today.
I think that systems designed with the axioms of identity in mind will be more effective than systems designed without regard for the axioms.
I think that the axioms define how identity and privacy are related, and can help illuminate when we can determine identity, when we can protect privacy, when we must choose, and when we are out of luck on both counts.

He recommends a book that goes in the philosophical direction The Identities of Persons. Just for fun on Amazon I surfed around this book through the “people who bought this book also bought this and similar items. Just two steps away in the Amazon Cloud of related books are Modern Cosmology and Philosphy, Methods of Ethics, Metaphors We Live By. This highlights how closely Identity and its meaning are tied.
This transitions me over to another subject of the week Y!-Flkr eruptions. There was quite a fuss over the Yahoo! ID – Flickr ID linking (or optional linking). Mary Hodder did a great job of articulating the very real human issues of identity surrounding this storm. Truly every time we login with an handle of any kind – that is an identity of ours. It is not just an entry in a database not just bits or just identifiers. These are identifiers of people. Why does this matter? Cause people are not just web resources.

One of the people who works for me showed me a database on Monday, while we were discussing the Flickhoo flap, that she’s been maintaining for the past 10 years of all of her logins all over the internet. She has 249 different logins at that many sites. Solving this problem, so that she could just use one or two or three logins everywhere, makes a lot of sense.

Mary did a great job of articulating a cool way out of the dilemma – give them all i-names and let Yahoo! become an I-broker! Let Flickr give all their folks i-names and let them manage their own Identity and choose if they want to host to i-names together in one broker or keep them separate. [she gets the syntax a bit wrong Yahoo could change them easily into @yahoo*username accounts]

And Yahoo could really take the lead on Identity Management by adopting a system that would create simplicity for users, and simplicity for themselves. And turn down the public relations flap a notch when they acquire companies and have to integrate users and ID’s into the company.

Ryan King (currently of Technorati) made a comment that seemed to come from the very technical utilitarian perspective:

The Yahoo/Flickr changes have nothing to do with identity- its only the login procedure, which is now done with an email address.

Even “if” all it means that you now login to Flickr using a YahooID, then those two identities are linked. Yahoo can go in and look at your flickr picks and the tags and aggregate more information about you in its digital dossier. Yahoo uses the information about you that it observes while you move about it to send you ads you will like and other stuff (I don’t really use Yahoo! day-to-day [I do have a really really old login that is my messenger identity and one e-mail account for emergencies], so I am not up on the full user experience there. But they are becoming a cooler company so maybe I will join in but not likely until they are a member of Identity Commons and Attention Trust so I can better trust their use of my identity and information associated with it). This is what helps them make money off you – selling annoying adds around the real information you want to see.
What if they went to a permission marketing model with i-names as is suggested near the end of Dear Marketers, An Open Letter from your Customers in July 2005 and these use cases articulated by Fen two years ago? Fen also wrote about a service he envisioned and tried to build News Peek that is currently a lot like what the blogosphere offers. I think we are on the cusp of ‘getting identity’ there enough folks involved like Bob, Doc, Drummond, Kim, Paul, Jamie, John, and Owen who are wise enough to understand and lead the industry wrestling with the human social issues that arise.
OK and now for blog number two. It is another gentleman that I encouraged to start blogging in the field – Eric Hall of EDS. His blog WhyID (wide-eyed) has been going along since just after Catalyst when we met. His perspective leading teams of 100’s working on large scale enterprise integration is valuable to consider when we are talking about provisioning the millions of people on the web with identity. I hope you all get a chance to look over his last two months of writing, and add the RSS to your stack of feeds.

People like Gnomdex so there is BAR Camp

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From Marc Canter

Doc and I are doing a panel on the ‘OpenWeb’ so I hope folks come or at least tune-in via webcast or IRC. But the AO conference WILL be propogated by VCs and rich people – and I prefer hanging out with normal people the best.
That’s why I love Gnomedex. I sure hope there’s another one – soon – like at the end of September.

I found this in my list of saved but not posted blog posts. Seems like Marc’s wish is going to come true – BAR Camp is this weekend. I just found out about it from Eugene Kim’s blog (he has been posting some great stuff this past week about wikimania and collaboration patterns). Likely I will go down with Mary and share the demo of i-names sso working on wordpress that I did at DrupalCon in Porland two weeks ago.

TLD Craziness

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.mobi
DESPITE FIERCE CRITICISM from Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, ICANN has decided to go ahead and create a new TLD (Top Level Domain) aimed at mobile phones and other mobile devices.
.tel
ICANN hasn’t posted it on their website yet, but according to one of their board members, the .tel top-level domain was approved.” notellmo.tel is going to be one of the first domains sold.

Perhaps there is one good thing about xdi – there is one organizational names space @name.

I own my own Attention. Do you?

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This week I joined Attention Trust. Steve Gilmore is the president and Mary Hodder is the Chair of the advisory board. It seems like a great application for the Identity systems we are working on.
What Matters?

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.

Nick Bradbury puts it this way:

I want personalized search. I want my attention data to help tools and services find the stuff that matters to me so I can cut down on information overload. But I only want this if:
1 It’s done in a way that protects my privacy
2 The service that collects my attention data lets me get it back, so I can share it with other services

Aldo agrees

Much of what they have to say jibes with my thoughts on digital identity and new collaborative finance models and reputation systems and all that abstract stuff that is still too messy for me to explain with much clarity…..I’ll continue to work on that….in the mean time please read Nick’s piece.

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Building for Peace | Cell Phone Presence

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One of the things that I have always been inspired by since first going to Planetwork’s first conference in 2000 is the potential of these tools do do good. Johannes posted this on the Empowered citizen after the London Bombings and is a great reminder to consider why digital identity is important to continue building. While we must continue building we also must think about what we are building and how it can be used. Below is a post I found a while back that reminds us we must think about the implications of the powers we build into these new gadgets.

Empowered connected citizens are what changes the terrorist dynamic.
As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose very life is centered around building things, not destroying them, I watch in utter disbelief and complete incomprehension. How can anyone’s goal be total destruction? How can any of them believe anything will come out of these acts, except for more destruction? What sick world view is that?
There is a clear line. There are those who build, and those who destroy. Those who construct, and those who destruct. Deep down, I feel there is little middle ground. You are either with us pushing forward for positive, constructive change, or against us, killing and burning. There cannot be a compromise.
Many asked the question last week: “what can I do, how can I help?” My answer is simple: “Keep building.” Whether you are in high-tech, building new companies, products and markets; or a street sweeper, helping to build a beautiful city; or a parent or teacher, building understanding and new lives; or wherever you are. We, the builders, can build more than they can ever destroy. We can build better and stronger. And we will. We, the builders, will prevail, and there is no doubt about that.

Some interesting issues from the CTO forum on the Entrepreneurship Blog.
Presence information Cell phone providers could exploit.

  • Cellular providers know who you are and where you are as long as your cell phone is on. If you are with a group of people they could detect who you are with.
  • The aggregate statistics and behaviors that could be mined from cell phone presence/position data must be worth billions.
  • The identity and security implication are fun to think about. Your cell phone presence information becomes another part of your digital identity.
  • How much presence information should a cell phone customer share with their peers?
  • Maybe the customer would like to place delay loops for some of their contacts. Do you inform a peer that the information they see is delayed or do you want them to believe it is in real time? Perhaps you want you location to be fuzzy like consumer GPS. How fuzzy? It probably depends on who wants to know.

I was surprised Digital Identity wasn’t discussed.

#11 – Free Identity!

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Eugene just did a great post about Free Identity as a recommendation of what should fill out Jimmy Wale’s post from wikimania of 10 things that need to be free.
Here is a sumary of the top 10 so far
1. Free the Encyclopedia!
2. Free the Dictionary!
3. Free the Curriculum!
4. Free the Music!
5. Free the Art!
6. Free the File Formats!
7. Free the Maps!
8. Free the Product Identifiers!
9. Free the TV Listings!
10. Free the Communities!
It does seem very relevant to have free communities one needs to have free identity to move between communities smoothly. Hopefully the walled gardens will figure it out.